Berggarten ( German: Berggarten - "garden on the mountain") is a botanical garden in Hanover in the Herrenhausen district.
One of the very first botanical gardens in Germany appeared in 1666 as a garden at the court of the Duke Johann Friedrich of Braunschweig-Kalenberg on the site of a sandy mountain near the Herrenhausen Palace . Elector Sofia of Hanover turned Berggarten into a garden of exotic plants, for which a greenhouse was built in 1686. Berggarten also tried to grow rice unsuccessfully, but the attempt with tobacco and mulberry was a success.
In the years 1726-1727 in Berggarten an alley was laid, which now leads from Herrenhäuser Strasse to the Welfare Mausoleum . Since 1750, the kitchen of the duke's courtyard with vegetables and fruits was taken over by the garden in Linden, so Berggarten became an exclusively botanical garden.
The gardener’s house, designed by Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves in the years 1817-1820, entered the garden library in 1952. In 1849, the palm pavilion built by Laves opened, which five years later had the most valuable and most extensive collection of palm trees in Europe. In the years 1842-1847, the construction of the Welfare Mausoleum was underway according to the project of Laves. In the years 1845-1846, Berggarten was surrounded by a wall and a fence. In 1880, a large palm pavilion was built, a real palace of glass and steel 30 meters high with galleries and fountains.
The restoration of the greenhouses destroyed by the bombing of World War II in Berggarten began in 1944. In the 1950s, the palm pavilion was demolished.
Currently, more than 12 thousand plant species from different climatic zones, including the largest collection of orchids in Europe, are demonstrated in the Berggarten pavilions.
A tropical pavilion was erected at the site of the palm pavilion for the Expo 2000 exhibition, in which the landscape of a tropical forest with butterflies, frogs and small birds from tropical regions was recreated. In 2006, it was decided to close the pavilion due to the high costs of its maintenance. The building was converted into a Sealife aquarium, and the tropical forest was saved. The sea basin is designed for 300 thousand liters of water. The ocean pool with sharks and turtles has a depth of four meters and for the convenience of visitors is equipped with an eight-meter-long organic glass tunnel.